


for nothing now can ever come to any good

by notavodkashot



Series: FFXV one shots [16]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Canon Compliant, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-25 23:32:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18172892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notavodkashot/pseuds/notavodkashot
Summary: Cor lived long enough to see the Dawn.Cor lived long enough to put Nyx and himself to rest.





	for nothing now can ever come to any good

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PocketPrompto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PocketPrompto/gifts), [nyx_aeternum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyx_aeternum/gifts).



> Because my twitter feed has been producing quality angst for my favorite boys, and I couldn't not add some of my own. Just a little something to show my appreciation!

Dawn breaks. 

Cor knows what it means, sitting on the rim of a fountain long dead and dry. He looks at the sky, each new stroke of light painted carefully with a steady hand, and then he closes his eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out. When he opens his eyes, the world is fundamentally different, at its core. He can tell. His bones feel it echoing all the way down. 

“You’ve waited a decade,” he says, licking his lips and using his sword to push himself upright, back to his feet, even though his wounds throb and his muscles ache. “You can wait a little more.” 

Long enough, anyway, to find the boys at the feet of the throne, staring at their King and unsure of what to do next. 

Long enough to stand vigil on the King’s tomb, watching over people coming over to offer their goodbyes to their King. They bring flowers – precious, valuable commodities in the long night, for it is now surely not endless, it is done – and precious trinkets. Memories. Tokens of their lives. Treasures to pay homage to the King that made tomorrow possible. 

Cor sits in the distance, watching, and remembers a legend he read once, about paying one’s fare to cross the riven down into the afterlife. 

“Soon,” he promises, words muttered against his teeth, sword clutched by his side, waiting for relief to break into the hard earned road towards the future. “Soon.” 

* * *

One day, long after the King’s tomb has been completed – the last of Balouve’s marble and a shiny plaque forged out of the broken weapons of the ones who didn’t make it – Gladio comes to find him, in the square Cor has made into a den of sorts: where he sleeps and where he eats and where he offers advice to those brave enough to seek him out. 

“I don’t agree,” Gladio says, tall enough to look small in his bones, “I told them we couldn’t, mustn’t ask any more of you. I will support you, if you say no. But still. They want to ask.” 

A new council, then. The throne of Lucis is destined to be forever empty, for no one could hope to take the place of the last man who sat on it and fed his blood and the very marrow of his bones into his kingdom, who paid passage for his people, from the dark into the dawn. No one is brave enough to even try. Maybe, Cor thinks, decades from now. Maybe one day someone will think it’s silly the throne sits empty out of a legend that can’t possibly be true. Maybe then, Lucis will have a new King, one crowned by their own hand, without Gods as witnesses or the Crystal as an anchor. 

Maybe, they might even be happier that way. 

But not today. 

Cor isn’t angry, that they’d want him. That they’d ask him. Gladio’s anger is well-meant but ultimately misdirected. It is Cor’s curse, after all. Immortality means being there, when it began, when it spun out of control, and also later, when it all comes to settle in, to be safe once more. He’s the one who saw it all, the one who was meant to learn from it all. And, if he’s not dead, he’s always thought he should at least be of use. 

Always did think that, yes. 

“I’ll think about it,” Cor says. 

Smiles, wry and old but barely wise. 

He’s gone, by next morning. Gone with his sword. Gone with the pair of daggers Ignis rescued out of some monstrous daemon hours before the final fight. 

Gone. 

* * *

Galahd is wildness entrenching itself back in place, green bleeding in all shades across the landscape. Cor tilts his head back to feel the brunt of the storm howling into the sky, painting streaks of black and grey into the clouds. It is everything he was told it would be, and yet nothing at all like what he regrets never visiting when he could have. 

Galahd is empty. Cavernously, terrifyingly so. There were no power lines connecting to it, when the night fell. There was no simulacrum of light to even try and slow down the advance of the scourge. The scourge is gone, now, burnt away with the soft, tender caress of each new dawn. But dawn is merely the promise of new life, not the power to return that which had been lost already. 

In a few decades, he’s sure, people will return. Once they’re willing to believe the nightmare is over, when the scars don’t ache so much as to keep them up at night. When bravery is allowed to border stupidity once more. They will come back, to challenge the storm and seek out the simple truths on which every soul is judged upon these shores. 

In a few decades, yes, but for now, only his feet know the shape of the grass beneath them, only his lungs know the weight of drizzle in each breath. There’s no waypoints, in Galahd. Nothing but the storm, carefully sprinkled across the plains, along the rivers, up the cliffs. Cor consults his map by closing his eyes and remembering lines and arrows painted on skin, and then trying to spy the constellations high above, peeking at him through the shroud of rain. It shouldn’t have worked. But so very few things he’d ever done had actually been meant to be done, it’s fair he thinks, that this one does. 

He finds the valley, in the end. Not the village, because the wood has long rotted away, stone foundations hammered into dust by the war and plague and the storm. He could be wrong, but his gut tells him he’s not, so he counts the steps, drawing lines across to find the center. Then he kneels there, and one by one, pulls out the treasures from the depths of his bag. Kukris first, one forged in this village, one forged in the heart of Insomnia, both once blessed by the power of Kings, stolen by the scourge, taken along to witness the end of it all. The rings, next, mismatched set, scavenged in the lull between one battle and the next, impulsive tribute to an even more impulsive ritual to solidify the one stroke of madness he never grew to regret. Last, his own sword, the only one he ever managed not to lose or break or otherwise grow sick of, sturdy blade held by a sturdier hand, made to reap all he had sowed. 

Cor feels the moment the storm changes, the rhythm shifting tracks into an entirely new song. He looks up and finds Ramuh looking down, thunder and lightning and judgment waiting to be meted out. 

Breathe in. 

Cor bows his head, eyes sliding shut in relief. 

Breathe out. 

The bolt strikes true. 

* * *

They will, over the years, argue bitterly on whether a tombstone should be raised in his name. He was old, then, the last time they saw him. He was withered and wounded and probably dying already, only too stupid to realize it quite yet. But he is the Immortal, too. His is the title woven through the winding tale of Lucis’ death and rebirth. A survivor, to those who were old enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with him and know the solid safety of his presence in the battlefield. A witness, to those who weren’t. Later still, shepherd of portentous events, a guiding light to entrench prophecy into fact. 

They will raise an altar, instead. 

Not to a god, not to the idea of divine intervention. 

Something more human, more resilient. 

At the heart of Insomnia, the three monuments that carry Lucis into its new childhood: An empty throne no one dares claim their own, so long memory holds, a tomb forever scratched with prayers and adorned with new flowers every dawn, and a lantern held in the hand of a man's statute whose name history will mercifully forget, flame forever burning with the immortal hope of tomorrow. 

* * *

In Galahd, a whim of divine mercy splashes out in arcs of crystal, a marker left behind to commemorate a story no one will retell. It lies deep in the heart of the forest, behind a labyrinth no one quite knows how to navigate anymore, for no one living carries on their skin the map to find it. Coeurls nest in the caves up in the cliffs, though, above the valley, a new species born after the dawn, descended from the Lucian family, but Galahdian at heart. 

One day, when the idea of endless night belongs to the same pantheon of myths as the Crystal and the Scourge and the King that fought it, they will call the massive crystal flower Ramuh’s heart and bring offerings of milk and honey and all sorts of things grandmothers tell them Gods like best. 

One day. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out on [DW](https://notavodkashot.dreamwidth.org/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/notavodkashot), if you'd like.


End file.
